In the Spotlight: Turning Data into Insights

As organizations continue to focus on enhancing their mobile employee experience, data-driven insights to support mobility program design and management are becoming increasingly critical. BGRS is continuously enhancing ways we provide program performance and employee mobility data to our clients. In early 2020, we introduced Data Scientist roles at BGRS. Armen Vardanyan, Data Scientist, is In the Spotlight to share his insights on this role.

How has data changed in the mobility industry in the past few years that make the role of the data scientist essential?

Armen Vardanyan: Data availability, due to increasing digitization of the mobility delivery models, is an important evolution for our industry. Organizations typically struggle to gather high-quality data and communicate insights from all the data available to them. This is especially true for specialized, complex, functions, such as employee mobility. The data, if purposefully aggregated and analyzed, can be one of the most valuable resources to understanding business needs and accelerating decision making. The rapid pace of change organizations are experiencing in a short amount of time brought the need for a dedicated group of people analyzing data, in an effort to adopt a more mature data culture, into an even sharper focus.

What is a Data Scientist and how does this role support BGRS’s clients?

Armen: As a Data Scientist, I am responsible for collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data sets to help determine patterns and relationships. I work with subject matter experts across functions such as Client Services, Digital Products, and Finance to understand their and their clients’ needs. The objective is to enhance existing or design new data models to turn data into actionable insights and make predictions and recommendations on future trends, while leveraging BGRS’s client and mobile employee digital customer experience ecosystem.

The insights we provide to our clients will play a decisive role in meeting their mobility objectives. By utilizing data and machine learning tools, we design interactive, configurable dashboards with key data points to support our clients in identifying trends, making decisions, including determining move budgets, budget allocations, and expense forecasts.

Providing personalized and proactive support for each mobile employee on their mobility journey is another area where data science can yield positive impacts. Using sophisticated data models, BGRS’s ReloPlanner, an online interactive move timeline, intuitively tracks the progress of a mobile employee’s move and delivers real-time, tailored updates and tasks through the various stages of their move.

We also see many organizations seeking to increase flexibility in policy benefits provision as one of the key solutions in the context of fast-paced change and diverse employee needs. In the past, offering flexible benefits programs was inhibited by the complexity of administering such programs. The new generation of digital solutions brings in more flexibility not just for the mobile employees, but also for the organizations looking to structure the flexible benefits programs to fit the specific needs of their workforce. BGRSflex™, BGRS’s highly configurable core/flex technology is integrated into our ReloAccess™ platform. It is one of the exciting data-driven solutions I had an opportunity to contribute to in my tenure with BGRS. This will continue to evolve more in the future and unveil more opportunities for clients and their mobile employees. The success of these programs is heavily reliant on accurate data, available in real-time, as well as on powerful data models built to streamline the program administration for both the employee and the client.